Tag: empire

This list is about regime change in sff. Not rebels running around torching things, or dreaming of a better day, but fiction that actually deals with what happens when the ruling order forcibly changes. It was a hard list to compile, because most people want aspirational stories, not hard truths, even authors, it seems.

Crossroads (trilogy), by Kate Elliott

Elliott is one of the best world builders in fantasy, and Crossroads does not disappoint. These novels deal with not only the clash of worlds, but what it means when a foreign army marches into another nation and forcibly changes the way things are done, with only the brutal efficiency that can be managed by religious zeal and desperate fear. And also there are giant eagles.

2. Robopocalypse, by Daniel H. Wilson

In this case, the humans start out on top, until some computers achieve ascendancy and decide the humans are too dangerous to keep around. This is the story of the survivors of the original blow out, and how they adapt to a world where every machine is a potential murderer.

3. Ancillary Sword (Imperial Radch #2), by Ann Leckie

In the fallout of Breq’s mission to kill Anaander Mianaai for her role in the destruction of Breq’s ship Justice of Toren, Breq must travel to a distant system where possible rebellion brews. A sort of peace may now exist, but ripples of Mianaai’s duplicity are sparking all sorts of problems across Radch space and Breq must find the problems and quell them–in her own, not necessarily imperial, ways–before the empire falls apart.

4. The House of Shattered Wings, by Aliette de Bodard

Selene is doing her best to hold House Silverspires together after the mysterious disappearance of Morningstar, the most powerful of all the angels who fell from Heaven, but despite her best efforts, things are falling apart. A series of mysterious deaths and magical failures make Silverspires ripe for plucking by the likes of House Hawthorn or even houses not controlled by Fallen. This is the aftermath of regime change in one house, but the loss of Morningstar may mean the loss of ascendancy for all Fallen in Paris if the mystery is not solved.

5. Cloudbound(BoneUniverse #2), by Fran Wilde

In this second of a trilogy, Kirit and Nat must contend with the consequences of their actions from Updraft, in which they revealed how the Spire and its Singers have been hiding the truth of the city from its inhabitants. Although these secrets may have provided some safety and kept order–important for a populace who lives in the sky and for whom any large-scale disruption to trade could prove disastrous–it may also have led to the imminent collapse of the city structure and understanding of the city’s history. Kirit and Nat are not welcomed as heroes, but looked upon with suspicion, forced out of the society they’d hoped to save, existing on the edges of the city and down in the damp cloudbound layers from which citizens usually never returned.

In the Martial Empire, freedom is the price you pay for security. Whether it’s knowing your social cast will always have the same privileges, or the surety of poverty in the Scholar’s quarter, the one thing the Martials always provide is guaranteed destiny. On the surface, this novel could fall into the “just another tale of empire” category, but as the story goes on Tahir builds out both the mythology and history of the Scholar and Martial civilizations to provide depth and conflict to both the Scholar struggle for freedom and the Martial fears of overturned dynasty.

An Ember in the Ashes hinges on the existence of a school of pseudo-peacekeepers, called Blackcliff, from which the mysterious and terrifying Masks graduate. These masks are highly trained military personnel, who also possess somewhat magical abilities that seem to exist primarily to terrify the populace. Laia is orphaned by a Mask raid on her Scholar home, in which her grandparents are killed and her brother taken. She joins a Scholar rebel group and infiltrates Blackcliff on a mission to gain the rebel’s trust and get them to help get her brother out.

Unfortunately, this is where things begin to fall apart, from a meta perspective. While everything Laia does in order to save her brother is realistic, even logical, the ways in which the narrative is constructed leaves somewhat to be desired. Elias, one of the few Masks to both unoppositionally disagree with everything the Masks stand for and to survey all the way to graduation (dissenters and the disloyal are weeded out mercilessly), is all too typical of the “slave to fate” protagonists who hates the world but is too scared to really do anything about it. The fact that he is one of the point of view characters, and so the reader spends a lot of time in his head, doesn’t help, as he often comes off as whiny and privileged.

The other major problem is the way in which women are handled in this novel. In short, they are isolated. There are three major woman characters, with a few supporting women characters. The three major characters–Laia, Helene, and the Commandant–exist as antagonists to each other, and provide motivation for Elias. Laia starts out free but subjugated and becomes a slave for whom he feels sympathy and a symbol of what is wrong with the Empire. Helene is his best friend and for some reason the only woman chosen to attend Blackcliff–the narrative gives a one-sentence explanation that one woman per generation is selected. She’s the perfect student, completely loyal to Elias, and therefore hates any other woman close to him.

Finally, the Commandant, Elias’ mother–again, the only woman of her generation–who is the only identifiable villain of the novel. Other characters exist who commit evil by degrees, but she’s the one made only of cruelty and malice, who enjoys torturing people. She made a name for herself hunting down rebels, and goes through slaves like cheap gloves, but somehow has managed to keep two kitchen slaves around for a few years, one of whom befriends Laia. But this friendship also really only exists to create tension and advance the plot. Otherwise women don’t really interact in this novel. They are all exceptional in their own way and all are wound up in a fate storyline controlled by a group of oracles whose motives are not clear, so not only are they isolated, their agency is somewhat curtailed by the fact that they exist to carry out the plans of an outside force.

So, while Ember in the Ashes had some character issues that need to be resolved in the following books, it was a compelling look at the way empire and colonialism perpetuates itself in numerous ways, effectively enslaving even those who nominally benefit from it. A good companion series might be Kate Elliott’s Court of Fives.

The world of Renthia is a terrifying place. Beautiful, but terrifying. Daleina, who lived through an attack by spirits as a child, knows this better than nearly anyone, and has dedicated her life to making sure that what happened to her village never happens to anyone in Renthia again. Spirits–air, water, ice, wood, fire, and earth–are what make the world live, but they are also the forces of death and destruction, and keeping the balance is the queen’s responsibility.

So what happens when the queen’s strength seems to be slipping?

Perhaps the most enjoyable parts of this novel are the ways in which it doesn’t bow to conventional narrative. The main character, Daleina, is not the best at everything, does not succeed in every venture and go on to save the day because of it. She’s a complicated character, to be sure, and it is the ways in which she responds to the actions of others that drives the plot and keeps the reader engaged with her quest to not only succeed at the academy, but to become an heir to the crown of Renthia and serve her people, in her own way.

The narrative is at times merely workmanlike, the consistent point of view of Daleina occasionally overly navel gazing, but more often than not the very imagination at the heart of the story is stunning and part of an overall feeling of simultaneous dread and wonder. This is a novel that doesn’t skirt the dangerous aspects of its fantasy elements, or couch the narrative in heroic imagery to such a degree that the reader is removed from the immediacy of harm. The fact that Daleina is part of a close-knit group, rather than the competent loner women protagonists often end up being, means that violence or tragedy cut doubly–the terror of an attack and the loss of a friend.

Ultimately, imagination and strong group dynamics carry the narrative, and make it an engrossing read. It has aspects of found family and the draw of having a magical academy as the main setting for Daleina’s story, with fun additions of the loner-mentor and a more casual approach to romantic relationships than is often seen in stories utilizing the “pre-modern” society standard. The novel does suffer a little from the “assumed white” manner of describing characters, where the skin color of a new character is given more attention if it is not white (though Durst includes not just the white-to-brown spectrum of Earth, but shades of green as well).

Growing
up the younger son of a rich family, made rich from the pepper trade on the
mainland, Jevick has learned that there is a price for everything. Living in the Tea Islands to the
south of the great empire of Olondria, Jevick’s life is simple, fed on stories
of such wonder that when he has the opportunity to go, he can’t help but take
it. He believes he is
prepared. He has read the great
books, been tutored in the language.
But there are some things you can’t learn simply from books.

A
coincidental meeting with a young woman, ill of a wasting sickness, going to
Olondria with her mother to seek a cure, reminds Jevick of his home, of and all
he is leaving behind, but it is not enough to stop him from fully immersing
himself in Olondrian culture, buying books wherever he can, and succumbing to
the magic of a place he has dreamed about nearly all his life. The magic of Olondria has always been
in the books, in their ability to call up stories and people long dead, but in
giving himself over to Olondria, Jevick finds himself drawn into a struggle not
of his making.

A Stranger in Olondria is, structurally,
a descendant of Tolkien’s works.
Samatar plants the seeds for her world’s cultures through the stories
they tell, the stories Jevick hears and reads during his travels. But where Tolkien was hampered by his
pastoralism, Samatar’s novel is a triumph of both storytelling and wonder. The novel’s use of Jevick as
first-person narrator allows it to position its atmosphere of awe and nostalgia
against the regret and injustice elicited by its plot structure without
becoming too grandiose to be affective.
The story that Jevick tells is relatively short, but juxtaposed against
the huge history of the world he traverses, the novel has a grand scope that
will make readers feel they are reading a much longer tale.

Those
who enjoy the storytelling devices used by writers like Tolkien will enjoy
Samatar’s mythologizing and the epic scale of A Stranger in Olondria.
Those who are captivated by “stranger in a strange land” stories will
enjoy following Jevick as he is immersed in a culture he has grown up loving second-hand. Readers looking for a novel they can
slow down and savour need look now further than A Stranger in Olondria.

Ancillary Justice is downright confusing
to read for the first hundred or so pages. And that’s entirely the point. In a universe-spanning tale of action and intrigue, Leckie
confronts—and forces the reader to confront—the idea of knowledge, particularly
self-knowledge, and how we can truly know anything, particularly ourselves.

Breq,
as she refers to herself, is a person trekking across the universe on a
personal quest. She is also a
ship, the Justice of Toren, in the
imperial fleet, watching everything her crew does. She is the mind not only of the ship itself, but also of a
thousand bodies who assist her officers in their duties, maintain order, and
above all serve Anaander Mianaai.

Jumping
straight over the how of creating
real artificial intelligence and giving it emotion to boot, Leckie takes up the
ethics of the act. In putting a
ship’s ancillaries—those human bodies who have been refitted to and connected
to the greater mind of the ship—in direct opposition to the ship itself, its
officers, ad the people of annexed worlds, Leckie explores how self-knowledge
is truly created and understood.
Do we as contemporary humans understand ourselves wholly from a
subjective viewpoint, or only as separate and opposite from those around us, be
they either sentient or
non-sentient? She obliquely, and
then directly through one of the characters Breq encounters, asks whether
creating intelligence also creates a soul, and a separate will.

In
a story in which half the characters are different iterations of the same
person, Leckie does an outstanding job at characterization, imbuing her main
characters with that something that
makes a character unique and alive.
Other than Breq, who is the point-of-view, Leckie doesn’t attempt to get
into the heads of her characters, letting their actions and interactions tell
their stories. As in life, what is
assumed, what is said about someone, often tells just as much as the truth.

Readers
who enjoy modern space opera and military science fiction will enjoy Leckie’s
vision of a far-future inter-galactic empire, particularly those who enjoy the
vision and knowledge that Alistair Reynolds puts into his novels but want a
little more introspection in terms of character and motivation. Those who love the exacting
anthropology of Ursula K. Le Guin or Elizabeth Bear’s science fiction will love
the long step into a new future that Leckie takes with her work. Readers who enjoy explorations of self,
such as those created by Toni Morrison will surely find much to love in the
more cerebral aspects of Leckie’s work.

For readers in search of a fantasy
novel that breaks from traditional high-fantasy, The Goblin Emperor provides a fresh interpretation of a lot that
has gone stale in recent years. It is the story of Maia, fourth son of the
emperor of the Elvish kingdoms, who becomes the unlikely ruler after the
emperor and his heirs are killed in an airship explosion. Addison has built a world that deviates
from traditional high fantasy in that people rely on manners and ritual, rather
than physical strength and fighting skills.

From
a world building perspective, there’s a lot going on in this novel. Rather than creating a setting and
letting the likes of Tolkien do the rest, Addison has imposed a social
structure and language on her world that elicits comparisons to the Elizabethan
world, to the age of the great European empires. The novel’s elves and goblins are not the caricatures of
purity or darkness that one often finds in fantasy stories, but are instead
more like to sides of a coin. They
have deep cultural differences that generally keep them as separate societies,
somewhat misunderstood to one another, and yet are obviously part of a shared
world history.

Maia’s
story is that of the reluctant hero.
Maia is good where others simply don’t consider goodness a requisite for
the right sort of life. His is not
merely a battle of wits as stories of empire and maneuvering often are; it is a
fight for empathy where little has generally before been found. Addison, however, walks a fine line
between the reluctant but noble ruler and a somewhat plaintive prisoner of
fate. The novel may begin to have
a claustrophobic feel to some readers who don’t fully identify with Maia, as he
is the point-of-view character of the story. Other characters whom he encounters seem only rough sketches
at first, often with unwieldy names and titles to remember, until they prove
themselves to Maia and he opens up to them, letting the reader find out more.

Readers
interested in high fantasy, but not looking for a traditional heroic fantasy
story will enjoy Maia’s journey of self-discovery and fight to become a proper
emperor. For those who love
stories with complicated mythologies and social structures, The Goblin Emperor has enough names,
titles, and belief systems to satisfy.
Readers unexcited by traditional “elven magic” will delight in the ways
Addison has turned technology into the magic of the realm, reminiscent of the
production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet as
a story of 20th-century empire building.